Cheating Yourself or Sabotaging Others

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Angela2BPecked
Angela2BPecked Posts: 7
in Food and Nutrition
When I am adding my food I notice what looks like a discrepancy with some of the nutritional information. Thankfully I cross reference most of the foods I adding to my food diary or I may run the risk of gaining weight. I figure I am not the only one to notice this! I contemplated why the nutritional facts people add to myfitnesspal are so inaccurate. The only conclusions I can come to are that some people are either cheating themselves so they can eat more or they are trying to sabotage the efforts of others to lose weight.

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  • 130annie
    130annie Posts: 339 Member
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    Sometimes I know things are not right....Then I change the amount, to say 1/2 serving. I do try to stay as honest as I can...
  • usedasbrandnew
    usedasbrandnew Posts: 300 Member
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    Sometimes I read the nutrition facts on a package, scan it, and different numbers come up... that makes me wonder...
  • brk_1982
    brk_1982 Posts: 125 Member
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    Here are some other reasons:
    -Ingredients vary by region, therefore so will the actual nutrition (even in comercially produced goods, not just homemade recipes)
    -Nutrition reporting regulations vary by region
    -People make honest mistakes
    -People only enter the macros/micros they're focused on without thinking that other people may be interested...not exactly intentional sabotage

    I'm sure this list can go on, but just wanted to make the point that most people have good intentions and are not trying to cheat themselves or others.
  • to_the_surface
    to_the_surface Posts: 38
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    As previous poster, many reasons for the discrepancies besides the "conspiracy theory".

    That said, check the amount of confirmations of a specific food info and use that as a way of weeding out the entries with errors on them as a good point to start.

    I've found that mostly generic items are those that show up in multiple entries in the data base (chicken breast for example); out of those entries there will be a few with several confirmations and others with less than 5. Usually, entries that are wrong do not have than many confirmations (many other users already found the discrepancies).

    For those foods that are not in the database, two options: one is to check the nutrition label yourself and add the entry to the database while at it. The other is to use the "recent foods" tab in you log when logging again a food item you've already searched for in the database. No need to go through trouble twice to find the right entry.
  • xxnellie146xx
    xxnellie146xx Posts: 996 Member
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    Sometimes I read the nutrition facts on a package, scan it, and different numbers come up... that makes me wonder...

    Me too...
  • webarr2003
    webarr2003 Posts: 20
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    I noticed that to. I have been killing myself this week, with exercising everday and mainly eating 75% healthy food only to find out that I lost one pound for the week. This is killing me maybe its the snacking I've been doing which I'm going to try to work on that this week. But I have noticed different serving sizes per ingrediants, sometimes I just go over the serving size that I put down not what I eat to keep myself in check (don't know how thats suppose to work).
  • Keiko385
    Keiko385 Posts: 514 Member
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    I will probably get my knuckles wrapped but when I find one that is horribly wrong I open up the nutritional data box and make corrections to the data
  • TriThreat
    TriThreat Posts: 313
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    I've noticed that, especially when it comes to foods that are taken from websites (like restaurant nutrition information) they keep updating and changing the nutrition info every so many months. so unless you are really on top of things, the calories may be outdated. this is usually just an honest mistake because of a lack of keeping up with calorie changes for products.

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